1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is in the field of telephony and pertains particularly to methods and apparatus for automated handling of outbound contacts requiring assured connection to a live agent.
2. Discussion of the State of the Art
In the field of telephony, call centers exist for handling transactions for companies marketing to consumers of products and services. One function available in many call centers is proactive outbound calling of customers for the purpose of engaging those customers in the sales process, hopefully resulting in new transactions.
Outbound dialing campaigns are run inside a contact center in automatic dialing mode. Automatic dialing modes may include progressive dialing mode and predictive dialing mode. Automatic outbound dialing campaigns do not guarantee a connection between the live potential customer and a live agent after the call is answered. In predictive dialing, the system dials more calls than there are available agents to handle the calls based on the assumption that some of those call attempts will not be successfully connected. Therefore, an agent may not appear available for all calls placed.
In progressive dialing mode the system places a call only when it discovers an agent available to take the call. However, the designated agent may become distracted by some other processing tasks and suddenly become unavailable to accept the dialed outbound call. In a blended campaign including incoming calls and outbound calls, incoming calls take priority and may further distract an agent from handling an outbound call in progressive dialing mode.
More recently, is has been observed that some outbound calls made by telephony call centers require an assurance or guarantee that an immediate connection to a live agent is established immediately after the call is answered by a live person. This requirement may be rooted in legislative regulations in specified areas where contact centers conduct business or by business-level requirements for handling specific types of highly valuable customers in outbound campaigns.
A challenge is to implement such ‘assured connections’ of live persons to agents within the outbound contact center in automatically dialed campaigns without impeding agent productivity. At the time of this writing guaranteed assurance of a live connection for an outbound contact can only be accomplished manually such as in preview dialing mode where an agent that is to handle the call places the call manually after previewing the dialing record. Obvious limitations to this approach include manual dial initiation and manual call progress detection performed by the agent placing the call. It has been shown in empirical testing that manual implementation of outbound contact is significantly less productive that automated dialing.
To automate dialing of contacts requiring assured connection, contact center administration may be required to sort out the dialing records requiring assured connection from standard dialing records and aggregate those into a separate campaign to run at a separate time with a suitable staff of agents for achieving assured connection for those calls answered. Agents working on such specialized campaigns cannot process any other interactions or perform any other tasks causing an impediment to agent productivity.
Therefore, what is clearly needed is a system and methods for automated handling of outbound calls requiring assured connection to a live agent upon answer of the call. A system such as this would enable assured connections without impeding call center productivity.